Time to brew the tea and pop the popcorn — it’s Season 2 of Britain’s beloved Downton Abbey! The men (well, except for the rich ones) are fighting, the women are pining (and becoming independent), and much of the show’s relentless intra-Downton intrigue has given way to the human drama of life during wartime. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s pulling together for the common good. So, in the spirit of class-conscious competition and self-interested jockeying for position, we’re declaring winners and losers for each episode of Downton Abbey.
The Crawleys and their staff may have solemnly celebrated the end of World War I this week, but the end of the international conflict hardly spells the end of their ongoing drama. While most of America was glued to the Super Bowl, we watched an entirely different set of players compete — and met a new character who threatened to change the fate of Downton forever. See who scored points and who came up short after the jump.
Time to brew the tea and pop the popcorn — it’s Season 2 of Britain’s beloved Downton Abbey! The men (well, except for the rich ones) are fighting, the women are pining (and becoming independent), and much of the show’s relentless intra-Downton intrigue has given way to the human drama of life during wartime. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s pulling together for the common good. So, in the spirit of class-conscious competition and self-interested jockeying for position, we’re declaring winners and losers for each episode of Downton Abbey.
As we predicted, last week’s heartwarming episode was followed by the most depressing hour in Downton history. The estate was plagued by death, injury, and scandal — and there was not a dry eye in our household by the time the credits rolled. Check out who came out on top (spoiler: this is a short list) and who suffered worst on this week’s Downton Abbey, after the jump.
Time to brew the tea and pop the popcorn — it’s Season 2 of Britain’s beloved Downton Abbey! The men (well, except for the rich ones) are fighting, the women are pining (and becoming independent), and much of the show’s relentless intra-Downton intrigue has given way to the human drama of life during wartime. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s pulling together for the common good. So, in the spirit of class-conscious competition and self-interested jockeying for position, we’re declaring winners and losers for each episode of Downton Abbey. In last night’s riveting hour — the best of the season so far, in our humble opinion — all of our favorite characters seemed to come out on top, while the villains and other irritating presences got what was coming to them. We’re sure the tables will turn at least a few more times before the series is through, but for now, let’s all rejoice over who came out on top (Bates and Anna! Mary and Matthew!) this week.
Time to brew the tea and pop the popcorn — it’s Season 2 of Britain’s beloved Downton Abbey! The men (well, except for the rich ones) are fighting, the women are pining (and becoming independent), and much of the show’s relentless intra-Downton intrigue has given way to the human drama of life during wartime. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s pulling together for the common good. So, in the spirit of class-conscious competition and self-interested jockeying for position, we’re declaring winners and losers for each episode of Downton Abbey. See where your favorite characters stand two installments in after the jump.
We often don’t really look at great logos — we just see them and know exactly what they mean, like the shape of a letter or a familiar word that our brains can process so quickly it seems as if it goes straight from image to understanding. Some logos are so ubiquitous that we would never think twice about what they mean or how they came to be, so when we came across this great little video about the PBS logo we decided to take a closer look at some iconic brand markers. Click through to read the stories behind a few of our favorite logos, and perhaps you will look at them a bit more closely in the future.
If you’ve been paying any kind of attention to music in the past twenty years, you know what the business of making, spreading, and listening to music has changed in almost every way. New technology, new distribution platforms and a growing digital world have shaken up the system entirely and only show signs of further change. Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online, a short film from PBS, will talk you through “these massive changes, and reveal how music blogs and websites have arisen as the new arbiters of quality.” With commentary from such fine internet music trendsetters and game changers as the founder of Hype Machine, a senior editor at Pitchfork, the co-founder of FADER, and the VP of Creative Development at Vimeo, it’s a good overview of the changing face of music. Click through to watch, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Love him or hate him (and we mostly love him around here), one can’t deny the lasting influence and importance of Woody Allen — or his astonishing productivity, knocking out a film a year as writer/director (and sometimes star) for the past, oh, forty years. The sheer volume of his output makes it less than surprising that American Masters’ new profile of the venerable filmmaker, Woody Allen: A Documentary, is a bit of an epic affair: it totals three-and-a-half hours and is running in two parts on PBS. Check out the preview and some surprising clips after the jump. Read More »
The 70th annual Peabody Awards were announced this morning. Celebrating “the best in electronic media for the year 2010,” the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is celebrating a whopping 39 honorees this year. The pool ranges from critically acclaimed TV shows (Justified, The Good Wife, Men of a Certain Age) and great radio programming (including one of our favorites, The Moth Radio Hour) to CNN’s coverage of the Gulf oil spill, outstanding local news series, and a generous number of HBO and PBS specials. See the whole list of Peabody recipients after the jump, read more about them here (PDF), and resolve to watch (or listen to) something smart for a change.
Celebrated for a body of work that confronts injustice, William Kentridge addresses South Africa’s brutal apartheid past and ongoing transformation through metaphoric imagery.
Working in a variety of media, Kentridge makes socially engaging art, while exploring the absurd. His films are constructed by continually drawing, erasing, and drawing again on the same piece of paper; in a recent production of Shostokovich’s opera The Nose for The Metropolitan Opera, Kentridge incorporated many of these animated shorts to potently convey the story of a runaway nose and the owner’s attempt to find it.
If you ever wore a felt-tip pen around your neck, wished the letter magnets on your refrigerator would rearrange themselves, or longed to bust the corner bodega for selling bogus videotapes, then surely you were a fan of PBS’s early ’90s series Ghostwriter. For those who missed out, Ghostwriter was an educational TV show about a group of multicultural middle school kids who solved mysteries with the aid of a friendly ghost (who had a penchant for words), set against the vaguely gritty backdrop of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. What wasn’t so obvious to us back then was the impressive array of celebrity cameos peppered throughout the series — such as a Samuel L. Jackson playing Ghostwriter Team member Jamal Jenkins’ father. Word! Check out the surprising array of stars featured in Ghostwriter episodes below.
